The diversity of progress
After 25 days and 24 nights, this is my last evening in India. But with each passing day, with each person I’ve met, with each place I’ve visited, and with each piece of information I’ve absorbed, it seems that my mental image of this fascinating country has become less and less coherent. If you asked me today what my most beautiful or memorable or scary or strange experience was, I’d be hard pressed to come up with an answer; nor could I put labels like “archaic,” “modern,” “anachronistic,” or “progressive” on many of the things I’ve seen. Maybe the range of experiences, the sharpness of the contrasts, the vastness of the country itself, its many quirks and contradictions, all the tastes, the sounds, the smells, the colors, … it is just too much for my narrow little mind to process. Maybe the fact that so many things here are changing, progressing, evolving all the time makes it impossible to pin down any one idea about this country with any degree of certainty.
Right now, for example, the view outside my window is serenely beautiful: I’m looking out over Mumbai’s Churchgate district, and what’s in front of me is a sea of gothic architecture, a green park where little boys in white uniforms play cricket, and in the background, the megacity’s skyline of gleaming glass towers. It’s surprisingly quiet here, the streets are clean, the traffic almost orderly—by Indian standards. Earlier, I had a delicious dinner of palak paneer (cottage cheese in a creamy spinach curry) accompanied by flavorful roti bread and sweet mango lassi. The sun is about to set, the temperature is pleasant and the landscape is bathed in a warm orange light.
But Mumbai is extraordinarily diverse, and, just like India as a whole, full of contrasts and contradictions. On the one hand, strolling through places like Churchgate, Colaba or Bandra West, it is easy to get the impression that its 22 million inhabitants live leisurely, comfortable, and prosperous lives—perhaps not unlike those of us in the West. And for some of them, this is certainly true: The young, upper-class elite working in insurance, banking, IT or Bollywood have seen their standard of living rise substantially over the past few decades. They drive nice imported cars. They eat in fine restaurants. They dress smartly. They go to the movies, the theater, the opera. They travel abroad. They smile when you pass them on the sidewalk. But as is often the case, the rising economic tide has not lifted all boats equally. Around 12 million people, more than half of Mumbai’s total population, dwell in its vast slums. Crammed into dilapidated buildings, with no access to clean drinking water or sanitation, those who have washed up there are often worse off than in the rural villages they once sought to escape.
There are thousands upon thousands of small hamlets scattered throughout the country’s vast hinterlands, home to hundreds of millions of people. These communities are barely connected to any kind of infrastructure; they’re often isolated, poor, and unbelievably anachronistic. Many of their members live on small plots of land that they cultivate on a subsistence-farming basis. A family may own a cow or a goat or a few chickens but lack access to running water, a sewage system, or electricity. Abhorrent cultural practices like sex-selective abortions and female infanticide have not completely been eradicated even today. No wonder that those who can flee these places and are pouring into urban areas, desperately trying their luck in cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, or Chennai.
But these sprawling megacities face their own unique problems. For example, while I was in Delhi—home to some 30 million people—air pollution had reached unbearable and almost unprecedented levels. The AQI was consistently above 300 (“severe”) and often above 400 (“hazardous”). Breathing this stuff unfiltered has roughly the same adverse health effects as smoking ten or more cigarettes a day. And while the city government’s emergency restrictions to curb further emissions, such as halting construction, banning trucks, and forcing school classes to switch to hybrid mode, were dutifully enacted, they were largely ignored. I, choking under my particle-filtering face mask, was often mocked by locals who passed me on the street, greeting me with derisive remarks like, “Wonderful pollution today, eh?”
Perhaps one of the things that makes India so hard to fathom is that contradictory statements about the place can be equally true at the same time. There’s no denying that the levels of poverty, pollution, deaths from treatable diseases, and even sectarian violence and hate crimes are unacceptably high. But many of these problems were much worse in the not-so-distant past. And many things are improving, albeit at a glacial pace. Much progress is being made. But much more needs to be done.
The challenges however are immensely exacerbated by India’s sheer scale. To give you one example: Since 2014, 100 million toilets have been built in rural villages across the country as part of the Modi government’s Clean India initiative. If that sounds kind of silly, think about what a difference the existence of each of those toilets can make. How many lives must have been saved because people didn’t get sick from contact with contaminated groundwater. How many cases of rape or sexual harassment have not occurred because women and girls had a safe place to go. How much easier, cleaner and more hygienic the lives of millions and millions of people must have become in the course of a single decade. But also consider the magnitude of this task in terms of logistics and investment. To end up with 100 million of them built in 10 years, you’d have to crank out on average of 27,000 toilets ever day; 1,140 every hour; 20 toilets every single minute; one every three seconds. But zooming out, the impact that this enormous undertaking had is no less striking: As a result, the proportion of people forced to practice open defecation has fallen from over 70% in 2000 to just 11% in 2022.
Positive developments likewise can be seen in many other areas: Deaths due to a lack of access to hand-washing facilities have been cut in half since 2010. The average number of years children spend in school has increased from just over one in the 1980s to more than five, while adult literacy has nearly doubled. And as crazy as India’s traffic still seems: The number of people killed in road accidents (per kilometer traveled) has dropped by 75% since 2000 and is now almost on par with the United States’.
But it would be misleading to paint a picture of India as a country moving toward a bright future on all fronts. Deaths from air pollution, for example, are consistently in excess of 2 million per year and show no sign of decreasing—and the flippant attitude of many locals to the issue certainly does not help. India’s annual CO2 emissions are growing almost exponentially. This country alone is responsible for 13% of the world’s plastic waste that ends up in the ocean. Alas, just like the list of India’s accomplishments is long and laudable, there are countless important matters on which progress is stalling.
Reflecting on all this as I gaze out into the dusk quietly settling over Mumbai, I’m not much wiser. On the one hand, India is teeming with young, smart, able-bodied, capable people. At the peak of its population growth in 2000 there were 3.35 births per woman, and the members of this huge cohort are now 25 years old and eager to pull their economic weight. Yet their immense potential seems to be largely wasted. A shocking 25 percent of young people here today are neither in school nor in the workforce, and those who are work mainly in low-wage jobs in the informal sector of the economy. I’ve complained vociferously about the immense number of annoying tuktuk drivers, shoeshine boys and souvenir vendors whose main source of income seems to be pestering tourists. But there’s no reason why they couldn’t make excellent scientists, software engineers, or entrepreneurs instead—except for a lack of education and opportunity. Of the 30 million people born here in 2000, I wonder, how many might have invented a groundbreaking technology or contributed to scientific research and arrived at an innovative solution for one of this country’s biggest problems, if their individual circumstances had been different? On the other hand, India’s birthrate has been declining rapidly for the past two decades and is now hovering around 2. And while the population is still growing, an end to this growth is certainly in sight. Will that demographic shift make progress easier or harder to come by in the long run?
Perhaps the bigger question is: What does “progress” actually mean for a country like India? The idea that all societies evolve along a similar path that starts with rustic agriculture and moves through industrialization to services and—finally—knowledge work, and that India is just two steps behind the West on this journey, may be overly simplistic. Why should India follow the same road and repeat the same mistakes that we have made? What I’ve seen of people’s daily lives today already has something like a steampunk quality to it, where centuries effortlessly bleed into one another: One moment you find yourself standing in a medieval bazaar, complete with horse-drawn carts, livestock roaming the streets, vendors selling dried cow dung, and a chicken being slaughtered right in front of you; but then an electric scooter zips through, delivering food for an app-based ride-sharing company. And the guy buying the poor decapitated chicken pays for what’s left of it by scanning a QR code with his smartphone.
By bypassing the technological dead ends that industrializing societies have stumbled into over the past 200 years, countries like India will hopefully be able to adopt more efficient solutions more quickly. For example, why invest billions in landline telephone infrastructure when 5G—or even Starlink—is faster, cheaper, and readily available? Why encourage private car ownership (which is fortunately still low in India, at about 160 cars per 1,000 people, compared to nearly 600 in Austria) and build a vast highway network instead of making public transportation cheap and ubiquitous right away? Why introduce credit and debit cards, with their security issues and costly point-of-sale infrastructure, when app-based QR payment systems are much cheaper and easier to use? Why should a largely vegetarian society first become a community of carnivores and then spend decades trying to make fake meat that tastes like the real thing? In these and many other cases, India has an advantage over Western societies because its population has not yet had the opportunity to emulate our most resource-intensive and wasteful behaviors—let’s hope it will make the most out of it.
This unfathomable blur that India has become in my mind is, upon closer inspection, perhaps more like a patchwork of countless impressions, thoughts, ideas, data points, and questions. As I watch the last rays of sunlight fade over Mumbai, I realize that for me, the enchanting beauty of this country lies in its complexity. It challenges you to embrace its chaos, to see progress and the seeming lack of it, achievement and struggle, as inseparable threads of the same tapestry. I had naively assumed that four weeks here, combined with a lot of reading and research, would leave me with a clear picture, with answers. But India doesn’t work like that. Instead, it raises questions; it demands reflection; it catalyzes critical thinking, not least about our own—my own—ways. And that is something to be deeply grateful for.